No one
can doubt Oliver Stone’s passion for Alexander (2004) – a film he labored over
for years to get made, and has been laboring over ever since to try and get
right. There are now four different versions of Stone’s epic about Alexander
the Great – the 175 minute theatrical version, that was greeted to bad reviews
and worse box office in 2004, the 167 minute “Director’s Cut” – that deleted
some footage, added back other footage and restricted the film for DVD release
in 2005, the 214 minute “Final Cut” released on DVD in 2007, which added back a
lot of footage, and was meant as a whole, epic roadshow cut like the films
Stone loved as a kid, and finally the “Ultimate Cut”, which 206 minutes long,
and played at a film festival in 2012 before coming to DVD back in 2014. (For
the record, for this viewing, I watched the 214 Final Cut – I would have
watched The Ultimate Cut, but as far as I can tell, it is not commercially
available in Canada – the great Bay Street Video does not have it, iTunes
didn’t have it, and on Amazon.ca, you can order it, but it lists it as an
“Import” – which isn’t true of Amazon.com). Stone’s passion therefore cannot
possibly be questioned. The results, however, can be. I hadn’t seen Alexander
since opening day back in 2004 when I watched the theatrical version, admired
Stone’s audacity and ambition, while not much liking the end result. Over the
years, I had heard from various people I should check out one version or
another of Stone’s film – that he had indeed made the film better with his continuous
tinkering with it. When I started this project to go back and re-watch all of
Stone’s films, Alexander was the film that filled me with the most
anticipation, and dread. Maybe there really was a great film somewhere within
all the footage Stone shot – that he finally came up with – then again, maybe a
longer version of the film would simply amplify all that was wrong with the
film in the first place. The end result ending up splitting the difference for
me – it is better than the theatrical cut, as it does fix much of the
frustrating structural issues with the film, but it sure as hell isn’t very
good, and at three and half hours was mainly a chore to sit through. It is the
type of grand folly of a film that only someone as talented as Stone can make.
There are those who will claim it’s some sort of masterwork – perhaps they are
the same crazy people who will tell you that Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate
isn’t an incoherent mess. They would be wrong.

In the
film, Alexander the Great is played by Colin Farrell – complete with an Irish
accent, that many of the supporting cast also try to adopt supposedly for
consistency, which was a mistake since everyone now just sounds silly – the
great conqueror who expands Macedonia’s Empire more than anyone thought possible.
In the movie’s version of events, he basically does this because he has a
massive Oedipus conflict. His well respected father, Phillip (Val Kilmer), was
loved by his men, but became a drunken and abusive lout. His mother, Olympia
(Angelina Jolie), donning a bizarre Russian accent, hates her husband and
drives her son to do bigger and better things. When the movie came out, many
read the film as an allegory for George W. Bush – a man driven to conquer a
land that didn’t want to be conquered in an effort to get out of the shadow of
his highly successful father. This is certainly Stone’s vision of W. – as his
2008 film about him would show – but if that is the case with Alexander, than
the allegory is confused at best, and incoherent at worst. The movie seems to
be of two minds about Alexander – at times admiring his audacity and vision,
and at times seeing him as a madman. Had Stone found a compelling way to
reconcile these two halves of Alexander, he may have been onto something – a
complex vision of the man, but he doesn’t (making things more confusing, the
movie is actually being told from a specific point-of-view – that of Ptolmey
(an aging Anthony Hopkins) – who when we hear him speak, basically does so in
glowing terms about Alexander, which isn’t the portrait we get in the movie.
Again – had Stone found an interesting way of showing this contradiction – like
Terrence Malick does in films like Badlands and Days of Heaven, where he plays
memory off of reality by contrasting the narration with the visuals – he could
have had something? But again, he doesn’t.

A major
part of the problem with the movie is the casting of Farrell in the central
role. Farrell has gone on to deliver quite a few fine performances in the
decade since Alexander, but here he has no idea what he’s doing. He isn’t
helped by a screenplay that often requires him to deliver long, dull speeches,
and star longingly at Jared Leto’s Hephaistion, who he is in love with. Farrell
basically plays Alexander like an emo teenager – always seemingly on the verge
of tears. It leaves a rather large whole at the center of the film that cannot
be filled.

Stone
makes other missteps along the way as well. He doesn’t sidestep Alexander’s
homosexuality in the film – it is clear that he and Hephasistion are in love –
but Stone does seem uncomfortable with it. The most sexual characters in the
movie are undeniably Angelina Jolie’s Olympias and Rosario Dawson’s Roxanna,
Alexander’s first wife – both of whom seem to want to devoir Alexander in every
conceivable way. By contrast, Leto sits around looking like a lost puppy dog.

It must
be said though that the battle scenes in the movie are generally quite good –
bloody, visceral and entertaining – even if Stone doesn’t quite seem to be able
to convey everything visually at all times, providing captions to tell us what
side the various armies are on at any given time. Like Any Given Sunday, there
is a lot of talk about strategy, that doesn’t quite translate to the actual “on
field” battles, which Stone wants to make violent and bloody. They work – but
pretty much only in isolation to everything around them.

I
admire Stone for making Alexander in the first place, and admire him more for
being so stubborn that he refuses to let it go until he has delivered the best
possible version he could. That takes commitment – the kind of commitment that
so few directors are capable of. However, now having seen two versions of the
movie, I have to say that I don’t think any amount of editing is going to save
this one. It is an audacious failure – but still very much a failure.

About Me

I am an accountant, living in Brantford, ON - and although I am married and have beautiful daughter, I still find time to watch a lot of movies. This blog is mostly reviews of new movies - with other musing thrown in as well.